At least for this post, anyway.

 

Let me take you back to the unac­counted days of our time here in Athens, the 23^rd and 24^th of last week.

 

And now that I have com­mit­ted myself to recount­ing I should actu­ally make sure I even remember…

 

Okay, got it. Here goes.

 

On Sat­ur­day, I did laun­dry. Which may not sound glam­orous at all but this is what one does on days off, espe­cially when the smell that comes from deter­gent (only rec­og­niz­able as such by the snug­gly bear on the bot­tle because it was pur­chased in a Greek super­mar­ket) is more prefer­able than eau de metro.

 

Oh, yeah and I think I read some plays—that’s for you #TimVasen.

 

Sun­day was πολύ καλή (poli kala—Greek for “very good” this is actu­ally the auto­matic response I’ve adopted from sur­vival Greek class or the right answer when some­one asks “How are you?” But I just wanted to slip it in here because I’m very proud of my lim­ited con­ver­sa­tional abil­i­ties and will cre­ate a con­text for it based on this pre­text. Every. Sin­gle. Time. πολύ καλή; πολύ καλή.)

 

We had almost the entire day off, so every­one formed their own plans and since you’re read­ing my post, you’ll have to read about mine. Don’t worry they were very πολύ καλή.

 

I woke up at 8:00 and tried to round up those who had expressed an inter­est in the Mona­s­ti­raki flea mar­ket, a Sun­day bazaar when the Greeks come out to sell, sell, sell.

Fun­nily enough, no one wanted to join me.

 

When I arrived in Mon­sti­raki square, tables were just being set up. Greeks and col­lege stu­dents are not so different.

 

I saun­tered down the streets until I came upon a tight throng of peo­ple. I joined the crowd, keep­ing a tight grip on my bag. Here was the com­merce– the energy of that Sun­day morning.

 

Pic­ture this scene:

 

Plas­tic tables, not unlike those used by retirees for play­ing bridge, were set up on the side­walks. They held a nice col­lec­tion of mis­cel­lany: “antique” coins, snow­globes, XXX videos.

 

Blan­kets with mis­matched china and naked Bar­bie dolls tended by bare­foot children.

 

A trunk full of off-white table­cloths that someone’s grand­mother prob­a­bly made.

 

Knives.

 

A type­writer.

 

An oil paint­ing of Adolf Hitler. (I some­how don’t think this ever sells)

 

Lots of wooden furniture.

 

It was the best adven­ture I’ve had so far, though I watched far more than I bought.

 

Much later in the evening, the entire group attended a Ger­man musi­cal that was a part of the Athens-Epidauros Festival.

 

This is what I know:

The play was called “The Return of Ulysses.”It was per­formed by a troupe from Berlin called Schaubühne Berlin. It was loosely based on Homer’s The Odyssey. It was all in Ger­man. The sub­ti­tles were in Greek.

 

That being said, despite the 90% of the play lost due to the Ger­man, we all came away with some idea of what we liked and didn’t like about the per­for­mance. It was vis­ceral in that sense and I guess that’s why Tim and Michael wanted us to go in the first place. We were able to pick up on who the Athena, Pene­lope, Telemachus, and Odysseus fig­ures were as well as the sex­ual frus­tra­tion of Athena, Pene­lope, Telemachus, and Odysseus. Maybe the Ger­man ren­di­tions of Greek epics and col­lege stu­dents are also not so dif­fer­ent. Haha. That was def­i­nitely the joke of this blog post. The only one. I (kinda) swear.